GLAM/Newsletter/April 2021/Single
WikiGap 2021; Workshop “When State Security was engaged in Science”; Women in STEM; International Roma Day Edit-a-thon
WikiGap 2021
For the fourth year in a row, WoALUG held the WikiGap Campaign with the support of the Embassy of Sweden in Albania on March 8. During the workshop, the participants created 36 new articles and did 55 edits about Albanian and Swedish female activists.
The next day, a group of participants was invited by the Swedish Ambassador, Elsa Håstad, to her residence in Tirana to talk about women’s rights activists in Albania and Sweden.
You can read more about statistics here.
Workshop “When Albanian State Security was engaged in Science”
“When Albanian State Security was engaged in Science” was another successful workshop WoALUG and The Authority for Information on Former State Security Documents (AIDSSH) organized in order to write and edit articles about the State Security and the Maliqi Wetland. These topics refer to what happened in Albania at the very beginning communism in 1946 and how the new communist regime condemned and executed a group of engineers at the time in the name of the people.
Women in STEM
Wikimedians of Albanian Language User Group and a group of students from the Mediterranean University of Albania came together to translate and create new articles about women in STEM.
The purpose of this edit-a-thon was to improve, write and translate articles that represent Women in Science in order to narrow the gender gap and stereotypes on Wikipedia. We developed a three-day workshop and welcomed many new and experienced people.
32 editors created 128 articles and edited 145 articles.
International Roma Day Edit-a-thon
On the occasion of the International Roma Day, Wikimedians of Albanian Language User Group joined the online global edit-a-thon with the intention to write and improve articles about Roma minorities, identity, history and culture in Albania and Kosovo.
We organized and conducted two online workshops with two organizations, Roma Versitas Albania and Roma Active Albania. Aside from writing and translating articles, we also discussed the small quantity of Roma community related articles that exist in Albanian.
A Wealth of Wiki Women
Four years of Women Write Wiki
One of Australia’s longest running Wikipedia editing groups celebrated four years of editing, activism and friendship in March. Women Write Wiki has met twice per month at The Women’s Library in the inner-Sydney suburb of Newtown since 2017.
Founded by Anna Kerr, the Principal Solicitor of the Feminist Legal Clinic in Sydney with technologist and general polymath Spider Redgold through Create NSW, the group has now created over 300 new pages and produced some of Australia’s most prolific Wikipedians such as Ann Reynolds and Margaret Donald (right).
“Wikipedia just mirrors the battles we have in general society,” Kerr reflects. “That's why having a team is so important. If you post something or have an issue, you can send it around and then several people would jump in and support you. It’s just so much better working together.”
Read more:
- Article: Four years of Women Write Wiki
Art+Feminism / Know My Name
From International Women’s Day to Women’s History Month, the focus on growing women’s content on Wikipedia platforms every March only grows and we’ve got the evidence to prove it. By the start of April, the number of pages about women on English Wikimedia reached 18.83 per cent. More than 60 Australian editors did their bit, joining edit-a-thons at Richmond Library in Melbourne and the National Gallery of Australia's library in Canberra to work on the Wikipedia presence of women in religion, art, science and academia. Together they created dozens of new pages and improved hundreds of existing articles.
Events were held at the National Gallery of Australia as part of its Know My Name initiative, University of Sydney School of Literature, Art and Media, University of Divinity and Art+Feminism with the Australian Women’s Register at Richmond Library. Know My Name, University of Sydney, Art+Feminism in Melbourne.
Women in Religion
The representation of women in religion on Wikipedia faces similar levels of bias than other areas, making up just 18 per cent of all biographies. Librarian Kerrie Burn of the Mannix Library in Melbourne is doing something about it, by coordinating the Australian Women in Religion Project, which is part of the wider 1000 Women in Religion Project that originated in the United States.
“It’s a really exciting project to be involved in,” Kerrie says.
With Wikimedia Australia, she recently hosted an edit-a-thon in Melbourne that saw eight volunteer editors (seven female and one male) come together to edit and produce seven new Wikipedia articles with significant updates to five pages.
“I really love it but it’s been a huge amount of work, especially in the data gathering,” says Kerrie. “Huge amounts are still to be done”
She’s got an initial list of 450 Australian historical and contemporary women of various religious denominations to work through and aims to achieve 100 of those in the next year.
You can explore the outcomes further at the following dashboard.
Read more:
- Article: More Wikipedia Women
- Article: Australian Women in Religion Edit-a-thon
Projects by Wikimedia Belgium
Iedereen Leest en de Vlaamse Jeugdboekenmaand
The fiftieth Flemish Youth Book Month in March was the direct reason for Iedereen Leest to give Flemish youth authors and illustrators more visibility on Wikipedia, a project in cooperation with nl:Wikimedia België, nl:meemoo, the nl:Letterenhuis, and nl:Villa Verbeelding.
Sena, Lore and Rosemarie are 3 young ladies who wrote several articles about youth authors and illustrators in the framework of the project Iedereen Leest. It was an instructive experience for them to be able to use the medium of Wikipedia to make youth authors better known to the public. Due to corona, the entire campaign was online.
Their mentor taught them very practical techniques, such as searching for content in the archives, using a native writing style, finding references, applying the right structure and layout to the article. They also noticed that Flanders is underrepresented compared to the Netherlands when it comes to youth writers and youth literature. And that you don't write an article on your own; other volunteers are immediately helping you...
You can read more about their adventures:
- Interview with Sena, Lore and Rosemarie.
- Lists of Flemish youth authors, translators and illustrators.
- The project Iedereen Leest.
Wiki Women Design
The Wiki Women Design project runs until the end of 2021 and aims to describe female designers on Wikipedia and related platforms (Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata). It is an initiative of the Flemish Architecture Institute and Wikimedia Belgium. It includes activities with several partners.
In April, we were guests at the Design Museum Ghent. This writing session focused on the women in archive of the National Documentation Centre for Crafts, which is part of the museum.
First, a training was provided via video conferencing. Afterwards, the participants were able to consult the archives of the museum and they also received assistance from the facilitators to help them edit their (first) Wikipedia article. Read more on Wiki Women Design.
Festa da Wiki-Lusofonia celebrates Wikipedia 20
Festa da Wiki-Lusofonia celebrates Wikipedia 20
Eight Wikimedia groups have gathered to organize the Festa da Wiki-Lusofonia to celebrate and reflect on Wikipedia and free knowledge. The event takes place on May 8th and 9th --Wikipedia in Portuguese turns 20 on May 11th.
The Festa da Wiki-Lusofonia is the result of an integration process of Wikimedians in Portugal and Brazil that has started in mid-November. Seven preliminary events were organized since then, creating awareness to Wikimedia projects and building stronger bonds between our editors and partners.
The program of the event will cover a diverse range of themes regarding Wikipedia, including discussions around its impact on free knowlege, its GLAM and education usage and the dynamics of its communities. You can find the full program here.
It will be broadcasted through YouTube and social media accounts from the organizer groups, Art+Feminism, Creative Commons Brasil, Foto Community User Group, GLAM Bibliotecas da USP, História na Wiki, Wiki Editoras Lx, Wikimedia Portugal (WMPT) e Wiki Movimento Brasil (WMB). Join us for this party!
Wikidata Labs are back!
April marked the return of the technical trainings on Wikidata organized by Wiki Movimento Brasil with two editions in a month.
The 27th edition of Wikidata Lab, "Wikiprojeto Leis Brasileiras" (WikiProject Brazilian Laws), presented by Éder Porto and Veronica Stocco on April 13th, covered the concept and the operation of a tool designed to create and improve items about Brazil's legislation on Wikidata. The tool proved to be practical and intuitive, which makes it easy for new users and comes in hand for the more experienced ones who want to operate it at scale. The WikiProject Brazilian Laws were supported by WikiCite.
The following edition of Wikidata Lab, presented this time by Éder Porto and Lucas Werkmeister on April 29th, covered the development of metadata applications using Wikimedia Toolforge. The event provided a better understanding of how metadata applications work, encouraging the development of new ones to optimize demands from GLAM-Wiki initiatives or other wikiprojects. Eder Porto highlighted the metadata apps developed inspired on the Museu Paulista collection: Wiki Quantos, Wiki Roupas, Wiki Motivos and Wiki Marcas.
Museu Paulista GLAM-Wiki initiative
Wiki Movimento Brasil reached in April the mark of 30 thousand images uploaded on Wikimedia Commons by Museu Paulista, one the most prestigious museums in Brazil. Almost 5 thousand images of Museu Paulista's collections new items were uploaded on Wikimedia Commons, which corresponds to more than 5% of the 33.190 avaiable online by now under Creative Commons licenses.
The images integrated the edit-a-thon "Decoração e identidades femininas e masculinas" (Decoration and male and female identities) on April 23. The third marathon organized by Museu Paulista and Wiki Movimento Brazil (WMB) user group on 2021, which counted with a speech delivered by Vânia Carneiro de Carvalho, curator, professor and researcher at Museu Paulista, gathered volunteer users to create and improve Wikipedia entries about the mentioned topic.
WikiGap 2021 report
Result: 238 new atticles from 71 partcipants - WikiGap 2021 went beyond our expectations
This year's WikiGap was organized online and we run 5 edit-a-thons
Our campaign to write more articles on women and women's topics on Wikipedia, and our effort to bring to online space more women Wikipedians started on March 8th and ended on April 8th, 2021. It consisted of 5 online events, open to community call with hashtag: #WikiGap2021, and active campaigns on the association's social networks and in some media (see one our videos below). A total of 176 new articles on the topic of women were created, even more articles matters related to female topics in general, and the final number outreached our expectations: 238 WikiGap articles altogether, written by 74 editors. Thanks to those 5 online edit-a-thons, which took place within one month, we managed to teach the basics of Wikipedia to 56 participants. We hope some of them will continue their work as editors. You can find some of the newly created articles below:
WikiGap was organized for the third time in the Czech Republic and we had great support from US Embassy and Sweden Embassy.
WMDRC - UG report: Wikipedia in library
April 2021
For the first time, our user group worked with librarians from the University of Kisangani. From April 8 to 9 we had fantastic sessions where librarians taught about what are their missions in the community and we taught them how the could achieve more by contributing to Wikipedia. They learned the basic of editing Wikipedia and created articles. You can find more info here
Finding new ways of making art visible + 360° panoramas of Estonian museums
Finding new ways of making art visible
How does a painting sound like? That clearly seems like a weird question: paintings are made to be looked at! But what if a person is blind?
Visual descriptions are used to provide information to blind or visually impaired people. So it is not really enough to say that "this is a landscape painting, where you can see a lake under a pair of fluffy clouds and a dark forest on the horizon". It has to be so much more precise for the listener to truly get the correct visual image in his/her mind. But how does one make information about a painting more universally understandable? What is that we take for granted? How could that knowledge reach blind people?
We ventured out to see on how that might look like. As a part of this cooperation with Tartu Art Museum we now have a set of audio files of visual descriptions of Estonian paintings in Wikimedia Commons. Ten of them already existed before (on the museum website) and five were created as part of this initiative. We also got some paintings from Tiit Pääsuke and assembled a virtual exhibition on the topic mixing together the visuals and descriptions of them.
- How that worked?
- In the second part of 2020 Tartu Art Museum had a Tiit Pääsuke retrospective exhibition “Nostalgialess”. We got some of the reproductions of those paintings to Wikimedia Commons.
- Five paintings were selected for the production of visual descriptions (an example, "Swan Carpet", can be seen on the right). Within the next few months, a text was put together by a translator with the help of a blind consultant, who reviewed whether everything was indeed understandable. After a series of reviews and edits, this resulted in a text file.
- An audio narrator then took that text and produced an audio file.
- The results are now available on the museum web page and on Wikimedia Commons. There is also a virtual exhibition on Wikipedia.
As indicated on the last GLAM newsletter writing from Estonia: we are moving from the time of scarcity to the time of plenty. In the beginning, there was hardly anything in Wikimedia except almost endless possibilities to add new articles and upload images of all kinds. But as Wikimedia projects have grown and matured, new challenges arise. Like with millions of GLAM-related images, how can they be showcased or even made findable? We have mainly been looking at the potential content when thinking about our interaction with the GLAM sector, but maybe we might need to look more for inspiration on how to advance the sharing of knowledge. We already have the "wikiLibrary", and we are in a need of wikiMuseum, but what else could be there? What else is hidden in plain view and what could we be testing with?
360° panoramas of Estonian museums
We got our hand at the first 360° panoramas at the end of 2019. In 2020 the main focus was on 360 panoramics of vocational schools in Estonia and now we have our first sets of 360° panoramas of various museums. How does that look like:
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Rakvere Castle and Vallimägi -
Rakvere castle interior -
View to the Estonian Aviation Museum -
Cockpit of F-4 Phantom II -
Estonian Mining Museum visitor center -
Estonian Mining Museum
Just make sure to look at the images in a 360° panoramic viewer. Example.
Panoramas were done by Lauri Veerde, who has made virtual tours for over ten years. He mostly uses Sony A7R III, Canon 8-15mm f/4 fisheye lens & Nodal Ninja panoramic head and usually shoots at 13mm in 6 directions + one down. Standard is 3 images in each position (+-2 EV) and so in total one panorama image consists of 21 photos. For post-processing he uses Lightroom, Ptgui, SNS-HDR, Photmatix, Aurora HDR, Photoshop, Topaz Labs plug-ins or whatever is needed.
Saami place names
Wikimedia Finland and Norway are planning to work on importing Saami places names to Wikidata as lexicographical data. Wikimedia Norway has already imported places with Northern, Lule, and Southern Saami place names in Norway to Wikidata, while Wikimedia Finland is still in the process of doing that with the places with Northern, Inari, and Skolt Saami names in the Place Names Register of the National Land Survey in Finland. The work is done in dialogue with Finnish institutions involved in recording place names. We are working with people from the National Land Survey of Finland, the National Library of Finland, FINTO, Kotus, Institute for the languages of Finland, Giellagas Institute, University of Oulu, SeCo, HELDIG, and the Finnish Environment Institute.
While preparing for the project, we have sidetracked on many interesting paths to find the best possible methods for doing spatial reconciliation, matching new geographic data to items already in Wikidata. The project documentation page reports on experiments with Mix'n'Match, Wikishootme, QGIS and OpenRefine. In the Wikimaps Telegram group we have discussed matching OSM data to items on Wikidata with the OSM ↔ Wikidata matcher. At the Wikimedia hackathon we hope to learn to use Jupyter notebooks to do some part of the process. Contact Susanna Ånäs if you are interested in similar challenges!
Journée Wikimédia Culture et numérique 2021; French open content report
Journée Wikimédia Culture et numérique 2021
Wikimédia France has organised a professional meeting the 16th April. This second edition since the first in 2019 was dedicated to open content from GLAM. The meeting which took place on line has been a resounding success in terms of participations. 400 subscribers for more than 250 attendees.The chat was really dynamic, with exchanges around definitions of open content, technical issues, debates etc. 14 speakers delivered precious feedback and participated to round-table discussions with thematics like «How to build an open content policy and projects in my institution ?» or «What are the stakes of open content ?». You can access to the schedule (in French) here : Journée Wikimedia Culture et Numérique 2021/Programme
French open content report
Wikimedia France is working on a French open content report to have a very first national analysis of what is done in open content field among the GLAM. We work on it with an agency specialised on social impact. The results are expected for September. Simultaneously, we are working on a label project for GLAM to support GLAM which have initiated and are conducting open content and contributions to Wikimedia policy.
Northern Exposure for cultural heritage data
Northern Exposure for cultural heritage data
This month our cultural data hackathon Coding da Vinci was back again for its 11th edition, and our third online event - this time in our northernmost state, Schleswig Holstein. Partnering this time with the state Ministry responsible for digitalization (MELUND), amongst others, the local organisers at the Schleswig-Holstein State Library were able to to gather an incredible 52 open datasets from 34 participating institutions - from Plattdeutsch street names, to costal birdlife, to a 19th century register of criminals arrested in the Duchy of Holstein. The datasets inspired 19 idea pitches and the teams behind them now embark on a 7-week sprint phase to develop projects for submission to the final presentations on 11th June.
At the same time, we also awarded the third round of Coding da Vinci Stipendia. Since 2020 we have been able to award up to 4 Stipendia to the participants of each hackathon: 3 months of financial support and personalised coaching/training for the further development of hackathon projects, with the winners selected by a jury. This round the awardees included team members from the Coding da Vinci Niedersachsen 2020 projects FabSeal, a tool for reconstituting printable 3d models of stamps from photographs of wax seals, and Plantala, a web app for designing mandalas based on didactic botanical illustrations from the University of Göttigen. These stipendia are not only a great way to support some of the amazing people we meet through our hackathons to further explore the creative reuse of cultural heritage data, but also to explore opportunities and challenges for connecting these digital projects back to the institutions whose collections are represented.
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Sketchnotes of ideas pitched at Coding da Vinci Schleswig Holstein 2021 -
Logo of project Plantala, Coding da Vinci Niedersachsen 2020 -
FabSeal: 3D-printed reconstructions of the original stamps from photos of a collection of traditional family seals
Proofread competition on Bengali Wikisource in collaboration with British Library
Two Centuries of Indian Print (TCIP) project of British Library digitizes rare books from its South Asian printed books collection. Months of collaborative talks led them to upload high quality scans of those books on Wikimedia Commons. West Bengal Wikimedians User Group then proposed to run a proofread competition based on those uploaded books, which TCIP officials readily agreed. Based on the collaboration, the user group organized a month long proofreading contest on Bengali Wikisource from 15 March 2021 to 14 April 2021. Tderrick, the Digital Curator for the TCIP project wrote an introductory blog post on the British Library website. 27 books uploaded by Tderrick were selected for the participants to proofread. 17 people enrolled and 16 people actually participated in the contest proofreading 2621 pages in total. After the competition ended, necessary information to distribute the prizes from the top 5 contributors was collected. TCIP officials sent digital certificates to all of them with logos of British Library, the user group and Bengali Wikisource. The user group sent t-shirts, books, germ protection kits, coffee mugs to respective winners residing in India.
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Tales of Shakespeare translated by Muktaram Vidyabagish -
Dhammpada translated by Satish Chandra Mitra -
Biography of Mary Carpenter by Kumudini Mitra
Wikisource Competition 2021; Museum Daerah Deli Serdang is now on Commons
Wikisource Competition 2021
Wikimedia Indonesia organized Wikisource Competition 2021, the third competition involving Wikisource project in Indonesia. The contest started on April 15 to April 30, 2021 and participated by 40 participants. There were at least 17 books provided to be proofread, which all of them are already in public domain.
Two most contributed participants were awarded special prizes, and tokens were given to those who have proofread at least 12 pages during the contest. Unlike the previous Wikisource contest, this year, the winners are all women, beating more than 35 others. We are glad to see more participants who are trying to make a try to edit in Wikisource, which is one of the objectives of this contest.
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Sultan Thaha Syaifuddin is one of the books provided to be proofread -
Brochure of national anthem of Indonesia Indonesia Raya
Museum Daerah Deli Serdang is now on Commons
Museum Daerah Deli Serdang, a local museum in Deli Serdang, opened their collections to Wikimedia Commons. This effort has been started last year but yet realized due to COVID-19 pandemic wave in Indonesia, forcing them to temporary close the institution. This year, thanks to online training conducted by GLAM Indonesia, they were able to upload their collections to Commons gradually.
Museum Daerah Deli Serdang is the 17th GLAM institution of Indonesia opened their collections to Commons by the help of Wikimedia Indonesia. A complete list of cooperation can be seen at this webpage. We will continue to approach more institutions and ensure the contents of Indonesia are available freely in the Wikimedia projects.
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Museum Daerah Deli Serdang, front yard -
Exhibition room at the second floor of the museum -
Photographs of figures of Deli Serdang in the museum -
One of the museum collections, photographed by museum staff -
Accordion, a musical instrument used in local dance
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A Wikipedian in residence at the Civic Museum of Modena: report
Since May 2020 the Civic Museum of Modena has hosted a Wikipedian in Residence, Niccolò "Jaqen" Caranti, as a part of a cooperation with Wikimedia Italia. The experience has recently come to its natural end: because of the ongoing pandemic the residency has unfortunately been only virtual, but the results were great nonetheless! As of April 2021 among the other things 361 images have been uploaded on Wikimedia Commons and 31 articles were created or improved on Italian Wikipedia. Many members of the staff have learned how to contribute, and they are willing to continue to do so. And hopefully it will soon be possibile for the Museum to host a live edit-a-thon!
WikiVrijdagen with Atria and IHLIA
During WikiVrijdagen we work monthly with Atria and IHLIA to promote more diversity in Wikimedia projects. In May, June and July we will again organise online WikiVrijdagen together and we have determined the following programme:
In May and June, we will write and publish one article together with participants who already have some knowledge about Wikipedia. We will divide the tasks, every participant will take on a part of the article and we will help each other. Starting Wikipedians will have the possibility to follow an introduction to Wikipedia and/or ask questions.
The WikiVrijdagen are very accessible and can be freely planned by the participants. Participants decide for themselves whether they join the starters or the more experienced group.
Wikimedians in Residence will increase the visibility of media art on Wikipedia
As part of the Media Art on Wikipedia project, two Wikimedians in Residence have been appointed to join the project team for six months.
The three-year project Media Art on Wikipedia started on 15 March this year and is a unique cooperation between LIMA, Wikimedia Nederland, Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed Amersfoort, several universities, NDE and DEN. The project aims to increase the online findability and accessibility of media art. This will happen by creating a link between Wikipedia and Mediakunst.net - the online catalogue in which the media art collections of various national museums and institutions are disclosed. The data of the artists on Mediakunst.net will be included in Wikidata, Wikimedia and Wikipedia.
The two Wikimedians, Hanno Lans and Stella van Ginkel, each add valuable expertise to the project team. Lans, who has extensive experience in advising, guiding and implementing web projects, will assist the technical team in realising the links between the various databases. Van Ginkel, who brings with her a large network and a great deal of knowledge about the Wikimedia community, will support the development and organisation of courses and writing sessions on artists and media art themes.
On Friday 23 April the online Wikimedia training Suriname and the Caribbean officially started. The training, funded by GO Fonds, is fully booked with over 35 participants from Suriname, Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao and the Netherlands. The participants of the training are mainly employees of cultural institutions. During the first master class on 23 April, the participants got a general introduction to Wikimedia projects, an introduction to Wikipedia by Ms. Yunette Aniceta (University of Curaçao), and stories from practice by two Wikipedians.
The next master classes will take place on 12 May (topic: Wikimedia Commons), 28 May (topic: Wikidata) and 11 June (topic: Sensitive heritage about the colonial past and Wikisource). The course will be concluded with a practical day on Saturday 26 June. Some of the participants will probably also join the Wiki Goes Caribbean project for further guidance on editing Wikipedia.
Papiamentu and Papiamento: Wikipedia is up and ready to go!
In 2018, on the initiative of UNESCO Nederland and Wikimedia Nederland, the Wiki goes Caribbean (WGC) project was launched, with the aim of expanding, enlarging, improving and updating the information about Suriname and the Caribbean part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands on Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons. In this context, the Wiki Goes Caribbean working group of Wikimedia Nederland decided to revive the Papiamentu/Papiamento Wikipedia. Since then, great progress has been made. Read more in this blog.
West Coast WikiCon and Performing Arts Aotearoa
West Coast WikiCon
Last mont we missed mentioning New Zealand's first-ever WikiConference, West Coast WikiCon 2021. New Zealand's COVID-free status means we've been able to continue with Wikimedia community meetups and events over most of the last year, and we decided to celebrate this by running small conferences in Wellington, Auckland, and (the first) in Hokitika. Hokitika is a small town on the remote West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand, a heavily-forested province with as history of gold- and coal-mining. The conference was to build on the success of 2020's West Coast Wikipedian at Large project, and Development West Coast continued their support by providing a venue for free.
The event, held over the weekend of March 20–21, was small, with 14 attendees. It was a mixture of presentations, organised as an Unconference, and skill-sharing and collaboration session. User:Schwede66 walked people through the Did You Know process, and we had arranged two local articles (Ebenezer Teichelmann and the Hokitika Wildfoods Festival) to feature in DYK during the conference. Other sessions discussed Wikisource, VIAF in Wikidata, article alerts, and how to support new users. There were two field trips, to the nearby settlement of Ross and to Hokitika Cemetery, both with introductions from local historians. Over 100 photos were added to Commons, and the corresponding articles were created or expanded.
Thanks to the generous support of the Wikimedia Foundation and InternetNZ, conference costs were heavily subsidised, so we had attendees from all over New Zealand. There was a taped welcome from Katherine Maher, a Wikipedia 20th Birthday cake, and Saturday night pizzas and bonfire on Hokitika Beach. All who attended thought it was a great success, and we're looking forward to Auckland WikiCon on July 17–18.
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Welcome dinner -
Afghans, official biscuit of the NZ Wikimedia movement -
Learning about Did You Know -
Cutting Wikipedia's 20th-birthday cake -
Beach bonfire
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Performing Arts Aotearoa project grant
User:Pakoire was successful in securing a project grant (only the second ever awarded to NZ) to run a four-month Wikiproject to improve the Wikimedia coverage of the performing arts in Aotearoa New Zealand. Wikipedia coverage of New Zealand topics in general is poor compared to Europe or North America, and the arts have been particularly neglected, especially Māori or Pasifika performers. Pakoire comes from a professional theatre background and is well placed to work with performing arts companies and practitioners to source information and clear copyrights on photo collections for Commons. She will run three edit-a-thons, in Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin. The project begins on May 17th, and one of its goals is to add photos for 100 performing-arts venues in New Zealand to Commons.
Great impact of cooperations
Wikipedian in residence - Belgrade City Library
The first six-month project, Wikipedian in residence in cooperation with the Belgrade City Library, was successfully completed in March. During this project, 126 new articles were written on Serbian Wikipedia, 26 were supplemented, and 278 were illustrated. A total of 1,001 files were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, of which 875 were photographs, 120 magazines, and 6 books. The fact that the Belgrade City Library hired Jovana, our Wikipedian in residence, as a historian after the completion of the project gives us a real indicator of the success of the cooperation and mutual satisfaction with the achieved results. With this cooperation and events after the end of the project, we have strengthened relations and paved the way for new successes
Wikipedian in residence - Jewish Digital Library
One-month Wikipedian in residence in cooperation with Jewish Digital Library was completed in March, which was the initial step in joint activities. During the Wikipedian in residence, 32 new articles were written, 8 were supplemented, and 5 were illustrated on Serbian Wikipedia, while 60 files were uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons, of which 6 were books. In cooperation with the Jewish Digital Library, we are working on the preparation of an edit-a-thon that will last from May 3 to 9.
Completing the catalog collection of the Association of Fine Artists of Serbia
In cooperation with the Association of Fine Artists of Serbia, we have digitized six more catalogs of the Association's Spring and Autumn exhibitions, thus completing the collection of post-war catalogs on Wikimedia Commons.
Successes of Wiki librarians
After the successful edit-a-thon in March, the Wiki Librarian project also held a student internship at the Department of Librarianship and Informatics, Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade. As far as 21 Wikipedians participated in the student internship, 13 new accounts were opened, 19 new articles were posted, 2 articles were supplemented and 36 files were posted.
Update on Cultural Heritage of Serbia
In the first four months of the Cultural Heritage of Serbia project, 512 files were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.
Gallery
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Monthly newspaper „Karadzic“ -
Jews in the wars for the freedom of Serbia 1912–1918 -
Tikun Hacоt (Midnight Prayer) - cover page -
Famous Serbs of the 19th century -
Catalog of the IV exhibition of the Association of Fine Artists of Serbia (1947)
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New partnerships
Teatro de la Zarzuela
After several initial contacts at the end of 2020, in which the Teatro de la Zarzuela showed interest in collaborating with Wikipedia, we have so far organised two online training sessions; one aimed at both theatre staff and students finishing their university studies, focusing on the basics of collaboration and editing on Wikipedia, and the other aimed at theatre staff, focusing on Wikimedia Commons, how to upload images, legal aspects, etc. After both sessions, they started editing articles, and made a first image upload, as a test, to a category created for this purpose.
Through two volunteers, the University of Navarra Photographic Archive agreed to upload images to Wikimedia Commons. They had previously published on Flickr, with an appropriate licence, but now they are making the leap to Wikimedia Commons. A training session was held with both volunteers and, in addition to creating the category where the images will be, a permission text was prepared and sent via OTRS, to ensure that there would be no problems related to their publication.
Ethnographic Museum of Zamora
In 2020, and through the Museum's library, the group of friends of the Ethnographic Museum of Zamora showed us their interest in creating a permanent editing group to create content on different cultural aspects of the province of Zamora. During this time they were disseminating their proposal, in order to attract potential participants, and once there was a sufficient number of people interested, it was decided to organise a training session. The basic aspects of Wikipedia editing were discussed, and from now on we will monitor the group to provide support for any questions or problems that may arise.
Collaborative Heritage Editathon
In mid-March, the Spanish delegation of ICOMOS contacted Wikimedia España with a proposal for collaboration; their idea was to create a permanent editing group with the aim of generating content on heritage and, in the long term, to involve other entities that work for the dissemination and conservation of heritage. As a starting point, we decided to organise an editathon that was quite successful, in which articles on little-known heritage elements were edited. After this first action, we are waiting for this permanent group to be created, to establish a continuous communication channel between ICOMOS and Wikimedia, through which we can support the group, and to organise more sessions and events in the future.
More music; Enriching GLAM photos with SDC; Swedish GLAM survey
More music
April 22 and 23 Musikverket hosted an online edit-a-thon along with Wikimedia Sverige and some regional music archives in Sweden. Articles were created, updated and improved, some musical notations were added to Wikimedia Commons and items about the Epistles of Fredman were updated.
Enriching GLAM photos with SDC
Wikimedia Sverige has been working on implementing Structured Data on Commons on a larger scale in GLAM material on Commons. We have previously worked on folk music recordings. In the last month, we focused on photographs from the UNESCO Archives. Many of those photos have good metadata, including where and when they were taken and whom they depict. Being able to convert that data to SDC statements was a small contribution to making the files on Wikimedia Commons more useful, searchable and discoverable.
The work on SDC in GLAM collections will be summarized in a set of case studies that will be published by Wikimedia Sverige at the end of June 2021, so that we can both share our experience and hopefully help others in their own projects.
Swedish GLAM survey
Through a small survey to Swedish GLAM institutions (Projekt GLAM), we asked for some areas to develop together. The purpose was to investigate which work processes are possible for future work and we got some good suggestions (in Swedish) to work further with.
When we asked what they want to achieve, we got the following answer:
– To be able to reach far more people with the knowledge we manage.
– Make data available and searchable over a long period of time.
– Get a wider distribution of our digital material.
– Increased participation and accessibility.
When we asked how Wikimedia Sweden can help to achieve those goals, we received these answers:
– Make it easier for organizations to upload their own material.
– Practical help with uploading and advice for how to do it.
– Collaborate in more and different projects.
– Opportunity to ask questions and get support.
GLAMhack 2021 & more
GLAMhack 2021: cultural data successfully hacked – a look back
An online laboratory of creativity
In addition to the actual hackathon on 16 and 17 April 2021, participants and other individuals interested in GLAM were given an opportunity to take part in various side events.
Eventpage / Challenges / Projects summarized / Onboarding / Pre-Event / Final Presentations / Aftermovie
Cinémathèque Suisse: New WikiProject Magic Latern Film Loops
50Y Swiss Women's Suffrage: Edit-a-thon at Historical Museum Lucerne
Interested in our 50Y Swiss Women's Suffrage Program?
Visit our project page
WP20: Action Week DACH Region
During the action week, we offered a vast program to all interested people who want to learn more about our work and our initiatives, meet the active community members and Wikipedia authors and the staff of each participating Chapter. Highlights were the GLAM online event we held on March 18, 2021 (refer to our presentation) and the WikiGAP workshop together with all the three Chapter and the Swedish Embassies of all the three countries on March 19, 2021.
University of Edinburgh Library Wikimedia Community of Interest; Khalili Collections; British Library
University of Edinburgh Library Wikimedia Community of Interest
A short update from the University of Edinburgh Library, where we have just set up a Wikimedia Community of Interest (COI) to share information and updates about Wikimedia projects and raise awareness among staff. The COI had its first meeting in April and was attended by over 20 members of staff. The session involved a top level overview of how the Library has worked with Wikipedia, Wiki Commons, Wikidata and Wikisource to date. Future sessions will involved going into more detail of each of these projects, with the next session (an overview of Wikipedia) timed to run during 1Lib1Ref so that Library staff can add citations. We are always interested in hearing from external speakers about their wiki work so please do get in touch!
Approximate dates for the next sessions:
- Wikipedia / 1Lib1Ref: 3 June 2021
- Wikidata: w/c 5 July 2021
- Wiki commons and Wiki Loves Monuments: w/c 16 August 2021
- Wikisource: w/c 27 September 2021
Future sessions TBC
Khalili Collections
In April I uploaded 12 new images, plus three cropped versions of existing files. In addition, a community member requested 13 images related to improvements they wanted to make on Wikipedia, and I secured permission from the Khalili Collections for those to remain on Commons. I'm happy to put requests for permission for specific images, but people should ask me to upload the images rather than doing it themselves. I have been adding images to various articles related to Islam and Japan. The bulk upload of images related to Islam is scheduled for June.
A new article on the Sitara (textile) went live and appeared on the Did You Know section of the English Wikipedia main page, the 15th article from this project to get a DYK and the 24th article created by the project (including translations). A draft article giving an overview of the Khalili Collection of Islamic Art has been submitted to Articles For Creation.
British Library
This was the second month of my residency as the Wikimedian-in-Residence at the British Library.
Some exciting things have happened, and a lot of progress is being made:
- We have further developed our work with the India Office Records, preparing material for uploads to Wikimedia Commons
- We have developed a revived Wiki Wednesdays programme of talks for Library staff, including collaborators from overseas.
- Our collaborative training event with IFLA for Wikidata trainers was well-received.
- We will be hosting an open hour for Wikidata contributors as part of IFLA’s #1lib1ref Wikidata throughout May, with a view to engaging with new editors from across European time zones. Details can be found here.
- We are preparing to run the Urban Tree Festival Wikithon in May, running from an introductory event on 15th May to an end of festival round up on 23rd May.
- A new blog post was uploaded to the Digital Scholarship blog: Wrangling Wikidata With #1lib1ref.
The Met, Smithsonian, and a busy Edit-a-thon season
Metropolitan Museum of Art activities
MuseWeb 21 talks
Jennie Choi and Andrew Lih presented at the recent MuseWeb 21 conference on "The Power of Wikidata." The talk discussed the open access work the museum has performed since 2017 starting with Wikipedian in Residence Richard Knipel, and with the projects Andrew and Richard are continuing today in enriching the metadata of artworks and Structured Data on Commons (SDC) (see below). All of this is part of year four of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Open Access initiative. Session details can be found at the conference schedule, and a full presentation is available.
Tags and depictions
Depiction statements are being added to Wikidata and Commons with the qualifier "determination method" (P459) being "Metropolitan Museum of Art Tagging Initiative" (Q106429444) to distinguish Met-sourced contributions from other depiction statements.
Because of the lack of support for reference statements in SDC, the qualifier method was chosen in order to have a consistent way to find these Met-sourced contributions across Wikidata and SDC. However, with further discussion, they plan to add both a reference/source statement and a qualifier, carrying the same content. While a reference is a proper place for this provenance information, the benefit of using a qualifier is the ability to use the basic search box on Mediawiki, since qualifiers are indexed, but source statements are not.
For example, on Commons, this search string will find all artwork images depicting "goats" as determined by the Met's tagging initiative (the same will work on Wikidata):
haswbstatement:P180=Q2934[P459=Q106429444]
This approach is valuable considering the search capabilities are currently quite weak on SDC right now – the beta search service at http://wcqs-beta.wmflabs.org/ is usually days (and up to a week) behind the current state of Commons. Being able to do a direct search via Wikibase is highly valuable.
Side note: Commons can actually handle reference/source statements, though the user interface does not display them, and there is no way to insert such statements for the ordinary user. The only way to add them is via tools like Quickstatements or to use the Mediawiki API. There are no current plans to add source statements to SDC, and the related open Phabricator task discussing this may be of interest: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T230315.
Smithsonian Institution activities
Two new Wikidata properties related to Smithsonian were approved and created this month:
- Artist file at (P9493) - For art history, artist files are a special form of vertical file that hold visual art research materials. The property in Wikidata will allow more precise pinpointing of where these materials can be found. Smithsonian American Art and Portrait Gallery Library, Frick Collection and Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec have already been systematically adding links to Wikidata, with more than 37,000 entries as of this writing. (SPARQL query)
- Smithsonian ARK ID (P9473) - The Smithsonian has adopted a new ARK identifier that can be used down to the digital asset level (image, model, resource). This was proposed by Andrew Lih, Smithsonian Wikimedian at Large, and approved as Smithsonian ARK ID and is being populated by bot based on Smithsonian unit number and accession numbers already in Wikidata. This will complement the Smithsonian resource ID (P7851) already used. An example:
- Basket Dancer
- Wikidata item - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q20452979
- Smithsonian resource ID - saam_1979.144.13
- Smithsonian ARK ID - vk7beaeb5cb-5f7b-45fd-9fe3-bb6b70adfbf5
- Basket Dancer
All existing ARK IDs can be seen via this SPARQL query.
Smithsonian Native American Women Edit-a-thon (AWHI & NMAI)
The virtual edit-a-thon with the National Museum of the American Indian was held over Zoom and had talks from Cynthia Chavez-Lamar (NMAI Associate Director for Museum Collections and Operations), Anya Montiel (NMAI Curator) and Rachel Menyuk (NMAI Archivist).
Kelly Doyle and Andrew Lih led the editing session of more than 20 participants that focused on a "co-pilot" model of training. Kelly and Andrew engaged in a dialog while editing pages on Acosia Red Elk, Andrea Delgado-Olson, Heather Dawn Thompson, and the Ione Band of Miwok Indians, while conversing with subject-level experts from the museum on how to properly describe the membership of individuals in tribes, and how this is reflected in prose and in infoboxes. Attendees later commented on how much they liked this approach of articulating the thought process of Wikipedia editors out loud while editing. We plan to further explore the co-piloting model in future edit-a-thons.
With 27 editors in attendance, we edited 33 articles, created 3 new articles, and added 9,000 words to Wikipedia about Native American women.
Page: AWHI/NMAI Edit-a-thon April 23,2021
Smithsonian AWHI + Wiki Ed Wiki Scholars Course
Through a grant from the Newmark Foundation, the Smithsonian American Women's History Initiative (AWHI) is working with Smithsonian Affiliate museums throughout the US to add notable women to Wikipedia. The WikiEd Foundation is leading trainings for Affiliate staff through their Wiki Scholars courses. The first round of courses started in April, with 40 Affiliate staff participating in 2 courses. Affiliate staff learning to edit and engage with Wikipedia will create space for increased Wiki activity at GLAMs throughout the country. Two additional courses will be offered later this summer.
Affiliate staff taking the course will also contribute to the Smithsonian list building project as a component of the course. Each participant will create a list of 10 notable women with metadata, references, etc. so they can be added to Wikidata, Wikipedia, and be used to populate edit-a-thon worklists. After all four courses run, we will have a list of at least 800 new women to add to Wikimedia.
Vaccine Safety Wikipedia Edit-a-thon
KNoW Science, Wikimedia DC, and Wikimedia Mexico held a workshop, Vaccine Safety Wikipedia Edit-a-thon April 2, 2021
American University Scholar as Detective
American University and Wikimedia DC held a workshop, American University Scholar as Detective Edit-a-thon
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American University Edit-a-thon
Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon
Seton Hall University and Wikimedia NYC held a workshop, Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon.
Sure We Can Earth Day - April 2021
Sure We Can, and Wikimedia NYC held a workshop, Sure We Can Earth Day - April 2021
Black Lunch Table
Black Lunch Table and Noircir Wikipédia held a workshop, Black Lunch Table/online April 2021
Environmental Health Edit-a-thon for Earth Day
Boston University Libraries hosted a virtual edit-a-thon on Thursday, April 22nd to celebrate Earth Day. This year's edit-a-thon focused on environmental health. The event included a presentation by Dr. Diana Ceballos, Environmental Health, Boston University School of Public Health, on environmental health in Wikipedia. Training for new Wikipedia editors was also provided. During the event, 3.84K words and 57 references were added. 11 articles were edited, including Environmental Health Divisions, Change and Children, and List of Parks in Boston.
San Diego/April 2021
Wikimedians in San Diego County, held a meetup, San Diego/April 2021
Philadelphia/WikiSalon
Wikimedians of Philadelphia held a WikiSalon, Philadelphia/WikiSalon 2021-04-10
WikiCaribbean/ EarthWeek2021
Wikimedians of the Caribbean and Afrocrowd held a workshop, WikiCaribbean/ EarthWeek2021
Fostering Connections: Wikimedia and Libraries Global Meetup
On April 21, the User Group hosted a global meetup. Thank you to all who attended and shared what they are doing and links to resources. Notes are here. We look forward to the next opportunity!
Extended Date Time Format for Wikibase
EDTF stands for Extended Date Time Format. The EDTF standard adds new date formats to ISO 8601-2019 2, including support for intervals, sets, uncertainty, precision and seasons. It was published by the US Library of Congress in 2019, after joint creation of the standard with the wider bibliographic community.
The new Wikibase EDTF extension adds an EDTF datatype to Wikibase, which supports the full EDTF specification. In other words, you can now have a property with type “Extended Date Time Format”, and then have statements with values like “15XX-12-25” or “{2010,2015..2020}”. This allows you to express dates too complex for the native Wikibase date format (ISO 8601-2004).
Wikibase validates the input, ensuring only valid EDTF values are stored. Furthermore, the user interface shows a “humanized” version of the EDTF value, which makes the value easier to understand to those not familiar with EDTF.
Wikibase EDTF is available as free open source software (GPL V2) that can be installed on any Wikibase 1.35 instance. It relies on a new PHP EDTF library we developed for the project, which is also open source. We welcome contributions to both the Wikibase EDTF extension and the EDTF library!
Professional.wiki was commissioned to create this extension by the Luxembourg Ministry of Culture, who financed the work.
Wikimedia Hackathon, Product Updates, and Office Hours
Wikimedia Hackathon
The Wikimedia Hackathon 2021 is happening on May 22 and 23, as a remote event open to everyone interested in discovering or taking part in the technical aspects of Wikimedia projects. Andrew Lih has proposed a Structured data on Commons jam session.
Product Updates
Media Search
In the second week of May 2021, Special:MediaSearch will become the default search landing page for all users. This feature is an image-focused interface that makes it easier to find what you’re looking for on Wikimedia Commons and it will make the millions of images contributed by libraries and cultural institutions much more accessible to a broad global audience.
‘Add an Image’ task on Android
If you have the Wikipedia Android app, you can help train the Image Suggestion API we introduced last month. A new ‘train algorithm’ task will ask logged-in users to determine if a suggested image is a good illustration of the contents of the article displayed. Unlike other suggested edits, this task won’t save edits to any Wiki projects. It’s a temporary task to gather data to improve the image matching algorithm and inform the design of future releases. You can see a GIF preview of the feature on the project page.
If you have feedback after trying the task, please leave it on this Phabricator ticket.
Office Hours
Wiki Movimento Brasil User Group will join our May office hours to start a hopeful conversation about a 2022 GLAM-Wiki conference. The last conference was in Israel in 2018 and the one before was in the Netherlands in 2015. The first office hours meeting will happen on Tuesday 25 May at 12pm UTC, followed by one on Thursday 27 May at 5pm UTC.
More details about past and upcoming meetings are available on the GLAM team office hours page.
The GLAM & Culture team also held two days of office hours in April to talk about Structured data on Commons. On the first day, there were presentations from Carly Bogen, the Foundation's Program Manager for Structured data, and Jennie Choi, General Manager of Collection Information for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The second day’s presentations were by John Cummings, Wikimedian in Residence at UNESCO, and Alicia Fagerving, Developer at Wikimedia Sverige (WMSE). Both shared Wikimedia Sweden’s work with Structured data, GLAM content, and Wiki Loves Monuments.
We had 39 participants across the two meetings and a few institutions present, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Digital Public Library of America, Yale Center for British Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Smartify, meemoo (the Flemish Institute for Archive), and Flickr.
Carly Bogen
Carly Bogen presented Media Search, which uses Structured data on Commons metadata to enhance the search results. It also powers the visual editor on Wikipedia, allowing more image results, in more languages, to show up to illustrate Wikipedia articles. To utilise these discovery features, Carly recommended adding multiple depicts statements, both general and specific, to media files on Commons.
Work-in-progress includes an assessment filter for Media Search, to surface files that have been assessed as quality or featured images. And bot writers in the Cebuano and Arabic communities are experimenting with the Image Suggestion API to test the feasibility of adding images to Wikipedia automatically.
Carly shared early concepts for how Upload Wizard could prompt contributors to add both general and specific depicts; how image suggestions could be applied within page editing or VisualEditor flows; and how notifications could be used to suggest articles for images that have just been uploaded, or suggest images for articles on watchlists.
There was an important discussion about balancing automated suggestions with respect for the experience of on-wiki “lived consensus” and some participants suggested an “opt-out” flag for certain pages to be excluded.
Jennie Choi
Jennie shared how she has added more than 10,000 Structured data statements to the Metropolitan Museum of Art files on Commons. Her hope is to improve the use of the institution’s images on Wikipedia, after learning that only 6% of their images have been used on Wikimedia projects. This would greatly improve the already high number of views they receive. Between January and April 2021, for example, the MET had 94 million views on media files across all Wikimedia languages and sites.
For this upload, Jennie used the PetScan tool to get the images' M-IDs (this process is described here), followed by the QuickStatements tool (also described here). You can watch Jennie’s presentation and guide to the upload process in the video below:
Jennie also raised important questions about Structured data on Commons modeling and the differences between metadata on Commons and Wikidata.
John Cummings
John is working at Wikimedia Sweden to share guidelines related to Structured data on Commons with GLAMs. His presentation was an introduction to how both Wikidata and Commons can make content from institutions more searchable, especially with Structured data on Commons properties, such as depicts, creator, source of file, rights statements, location, multilingual captions, and so on. There was a good discussion about the need to find agreement on data modeling and share example queries.
Alicia Fagerving
Alicia’s presentation brought some use cases for the discussion, with the Structured data on Commons uploads for Wiki Loves Monuments on Sweden, Israel, and Poland.
Bots have already added statements like creator, inception, and coordinates of point of view. Now, Alicia has added depicts statements to make images more searchable and participant in statements to allow new analysis. There was interest from other attendees in applying this approach to other contexts and a discussion about the use of participant in versus on focus list of Wikimedia project.
May's GLAM events
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